Writing Jurchen Names in English
Due to the scarcity of surviving Jurchen-language inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of primary documentary sources on the Jurchen people available to modern scholars are in Chinese. Therefore, when names of Jurchens, or Jurchen terms, are written in English, the same writing convention is usually followed as for Chinese words: that is, the English spelling is simply the Romanization (Pinyin or Wade–Giles, as the case may be) of the Modern Standard Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese characters that were used to render the Jurchen name or word. This standard presentation does not attempt to reconstruct the original Jurchen pronunciation of the word, or even the 12th-century Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese characters (even though more or less hypothetical Middle Chinese pronunciation of Chinese characters can be looked up in specialized dictionaries and databases, and reconstructing pronunciation of some Jurchen words is attempted by some authors as well.) Thus, for example, the Jurchen name of the first Jin emperor is written in Chinese as 完颜阿骨打, and appears in English scholarship as Wanyan Aguda (using Pinyin) or Wan-yen A-ku-ta (using the Wade–Giles system).
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